Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson has been avoiding constituents since the election of Donald Trump, so he probably thought he could handle some Madison East High School students, but boy was he wrong!

In the nearly 45 –minute Thursday question and answer session, recorded on social media by a student in the audience, Johnson was grilled on his views on public education and an array of other issues. His answers and interactions show just how uninformed his views on public education are and just how brilliant and amazing Wisconsin students are.

The exchange began when Madison East student, Lydia Hester, walked up to the microphone and asked Johnson:

I’m a freshman here at East. I’d like to know how you feel about privatizing schools? How you are able to be here and say that you want to help students when you voted for Betsy DeVos, who has no experience with public schools? DeVos has been pushing for “school choice” for twenty years. This is creating charter schools that replace public schools. Public schools are losing their funding from voucher schools. Public schools are being forced to shut down in Milwaukee. How can you say this will help us?

Johnson responds by telling the students voucher schools offer students a “golden ticket” out of “failing schools,” telling students they needed to watch a one-sided movie that touts corporate education reform, which has exacerbated the condition of public schools. Perhaps Johnson’s campaign donations from school privatizers have clouded his views on this issue. Research (link) continues to show that students in voucher and private charter schools perform no better than students in public schools. As public funds are diverted to the private voucher schools Johnson praises, public school budgets shrink.

Just recently news broke in Milwaukee that a charter school, Universal Academy, abruptly closed its doors on a third school in the city in six months, leaving Milwaukee Public Schools and Wisconsin taxpayers with a nearly $1 million dollar tab. Now families, students, and educators are being forced to scramble and pick up the pieces in the middle of the school year.

Another student followed by comparing Johnson’s earlier remarks about stabilizing the situation in Syria to first stabilizing Wisconsin public schools before experimenting with other reforms:

Earlier in the talk you talked how the solution for refugees (Syria) was to stabilize the area that they’re coming from rather than bringing more here. We could kind of use that as a parallel to what you were just saying about school choice. To say that we can’t all mobilize and leave our places of origin, which is what the refugees want to do, we need to stabilize the situation here so I don’t understand how you can have the two reversed views.

Graphic from a 2015 blog, when another failed voucher school, Daughters of the Father went under leaving families and MPS in a lurch. Other vouchers schools have failed since.

Finally a third student asked this brilliant question that Johnson handled about as well as Betsy DeVos did in her Senate confirmation hearing:

Do you think we should use standards of proficiency or standards of growth to measure student achievement, especially in relation to English classes which aren’t as straight-forwardly graded as math classes and why?

Johnson’s response:

You’re getting into some pretty esoteric educational pedagogy and I’m not an educator, I’m an accountant, I’m a plastics manufacturer.

Again, why are these politicians, who know nothing about educational policy, playing educator? Johnson forgets to mention that MPS schools were producing great results for students of color up until school vouchers and private charters started diverting money nearly 25 years ago in Milwaukee, the birthplace of a voucher district. Johnson didn’t want to admit that MPS students receive thousands of dollars less in per pupil funding than nearby suburban students, or that legislation to take over a democratically elected school board had been forced upon Milwaukee residents.

Johnson may have thought he could school a bunch of high school students, but these public school students could see right through his lies.

Share the knowledge:

Like this:

Join us as we “Walk In” to build the schools and communities our children deserve!

We want vibrant, public community schools that welcome and serve all children. We want public schools that are responsive to parents and the locally elected school board. We want public schools that offer special education services, bilingual education, and other programs that our children need.

sign up to host a walk in at a public school near you if you don’t see your school on the following list. Instructions to help set up and host an Action Network event page are here.

Like this:

Parents, students, educators, and community members: Please join us at a public school near you on Wednesday, February 17th at 7:00 a.m. to celebrate public education and to stand up for public schools that welcome and serve all children. Public education supporters in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Green Bay, Boston, and dozens of other cities around the nation will be also be walking in the same day.

Public education supporters will gather in front of their schools before the day starts to chant, march and share information about how school takeovers hurt our students. We will also educate others about public community schools that we know are a better solution than handing schools over to private third party operators. Finally, attendees will walk in to the school collectively just before the start of the school day as a community.

RSVP to attend an already established event or sign up to host a walk in at a public school near you. Keep checking back because new locations are signing up daily.
Instructions to help set up and host an Action Network event page are here.

Share the knowledge:

Like this:

What: MPS Superintendent Dr. Darienne Driver and School Board director Bonds have scheduled two meetings at Pulaski High School (Oct. 5th and 12th) to try and sell their Takeover of Pulaski. We know that no matter how much they try to dress up this Takeover as a good thing that Pulaski will not be handed over to privately-run charter schools that operate outside the democratically elected school board. Let’s show up and show out for our students and the future of public education in Wisconsin. Not one student, not one school takeover!

Where charters operate in independent buildings, the differences in resources are less stark. But co-location forces each side to contend with the fact that the charters are able to offer their students far greater advantages while siphoning off resources from children on the other side of the building. In New York, it is particularly acute as students at traditional schools are in dire need while charters enjoy the spoils of both public funding and wealthy private benefactors. It may be co-location, more than any other factor, that has frayed the nerves of parents, teachers and students, and stirred a debate that has taken a decidedly polarizing and political tone.

Share the knowledge:

Like this:

Daughter’s of the Father Christian Academy voucher school just abruptly closed its doors nine days into the school year making it 50+ Milwaukee voucher schools to be forced to close since 2004. Whether they have not met requirements related to finances, accreditation, student safety, or auditing every one of these schools didn’t serve the best interests of students and taxpayers. These failed voucher schools have hurt countless students and families as well as have cost Wisconsin taxpayers $139 million dollars in that time. Isn’t it time we pull the plug on this failed experiment called voucher schools?

Private schools that received state vouchers but were subsequently barred from participation in the program.

Traditionally known for our beer and bratwurst, Milwaukee has a new status: The country’s most segregated region.
When it comes to this country’s New Jim Crow, “We’re Number One.”

Jim Crow—legally mandated segregation, bolstered by beatings, lynchings and restrictions on the right to vote—helped overturn many advances after the end of slavery. Today, the New Jim Crow is taking aim at the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, using tools such as mass incarceration, voting restrictions, gerrymandering, zoning requirements, deportations, and “stand-your-ground” laws.

To cite one chilling statistic in the New Jim Crow: The incarceration rate for African- American men in Wisconsin is the highest in the United States—in a nation that imprisons more people than any other country in the world.

It is impossible to underestimate the impact of Milwaukee’s New Jim Crow on our children, our communities, and our public schools.

In the Milwaukee region, as is true nationally, housing patterns determine school demographics. Due to racial and economic segregation, our schools are increasingly segregated. Due to funding disparities, they are both separate and unequal.

The abandonment of our communities and public schools also has spread to our democracy. In 2011, Wisconsin’s Republican- dominated state legislature passed one of the strictest Voter ID bills in the country, with the issue still before the courts. This spring, the legislature drastically curtailed early voting. The measures are in line with a national campaign to suppress the vote.

If the Milwaukee region is serious about equal opportunity—from jobs to schools to healthcare to voting rights—we must dismantle the region’s racial and economic segregation. It will require a broad-based effort involving transportation, housing, economic development, criminal justice, voting rights, and school enrollment policies.

But it can be done.

Photo credit: Jill Engel-Miller

Share the knowledge:

Like this:

Schools and Communities United co-chairs Jenni Hofschutle and Ingrid Walker-Henry release the following public statement after a powerful Wednesday Auer Avenue Defense Rally in response to an offensive press release from Senators Alberta Darling and Representative Dale Kooyenga.

“As hundreds linked arms to protect Auer Avenue School from takeover yesterday, Sen. Darling and Rep. Kooyenga issued a press release attacking Auer children, families, and educators for low test scores, and criticizing the the Auer community for standing up for their public school.
Schools like Auer Avenue — where families are struggling with poverty, segregation, joblessness, and lack of health care — need support from state legislators, not attacks and takeovers.
Darling and Kooyenga’s claim that students and parents are “forced to attend Auer Avenue Elementary School” is an insult to parents who choose Auer Avenue for their children, and shows a total lack of understanding about Milwaukee’s educational landscape.
We call upon Sen. Darling and Rep. Kooyenga to listen to residents of Milwaukee about what our schools need to be successful. Come and visit Auer and other MPS schools and talk to parents, staff and students.
We also call upon those who care about the children in Milwaukee to stand up and protect Auer Avenue School and all public schools that are the foundation of a democratic society.”

The press release shows not only a complete lack of respect for the students, parents, and educators of Auer Avenue and Milwaukee, but it also shows ignorance of the real facts about MPS schools like Auer Avenue, detailed below and this blog written earlier this week.

Test scores canary in the coalmine at Auer Avenue and dozens of schools like Auer. Fifteen years ago, Auer Avenue was a “90-90-90 school” – shorthand for high poverty, highly segregated, and high achieving. At that time, Auer Avenue had the resources needed to employ a full team of professional educators to meet the needs of their students – a critical piece of the puzzle for student success in neighborhoods with high poverty and unemployment. At that time, Auer and other high-performing, high-poverty schools were fully staffed with librarians, guidance counselors, full-time reading specialists, art, music and physical education specialists, program implementers, technology teachers, paraprofessionals, special education teachers, nurses, social workers, psychologists, speech pathologists, and classroom teachers with small classes that allowed them to provide plenty of individual attention to children.

Many other schools at that time were also achieving at high levels despite high poverty and segregation:

What changed? Fifteen years ago, the voucher program was just hitting its stride in Milwaukee. A 15-year streak of defunding public schools – exacerbated by an inequitable state funding system – was just getting started. Since then, over a billion dollars has been siphoned away from the children at Auer Avenue and other MPS schools, and funneled into unaccountable, under-performing voucher schools. Governor Walker put the nail in the coffin in 2011 when he made the largest cut to public schools in Wisconsin history – over a billion in total, with a tens of millions in cuts to MPS.

There is clear evidence that when students living in poverty are prioritized and invested in, with the rich resources necessary to provide students true educational opportunity, their academic achievement thrives. When these supports are withdrawn, student achievement declines.

We know what must be done to increase academic achievement for students in poverty. The people of Wisconsin have the political will to do so, and we expect state legislators to listen. It’s time to acknowledge that vouchers and funding cuts have failed our students, and return to fully funded and vibrant community public schools.